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Thursday, December 29, 2016

Archives | Podcast | Oral history | Women's Studies | US in the 1900s

In
this episode we hear from twenty-five-year-old Amelia des Moulins, a
French dressmaker and immigrant living in New York City. Amelia came to
the U.S. in 1899. Amelia talks about life in Paris before coming to the
U.S., the fashion industry in Paris and New York, and her hard work to
be a success in a new country. Her story was collected as part of an
anthology published in 1906, titled, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans. The anthology was edited by Hamilton Holt, editor and publisher of the liberal weekly The Independent and later president of Rollins College.

Archives | Oral Histories | Native Americans

The library is looking for help protecting its tapes

In the 1960s, the Navajo Culture Center of
the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity (ONEO) turned to technology
to preserve the oral histories of the Navajo people. Over the course of
the next decade, the center recorded thousands of hours of oral
histories, logging stories, songs and details about life as experienced
by many Navajo elders. But while the preservation effort
documented priceless details for generations to come, keeping the
stories safe is harder—and more expensive—than it sounds.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Ebooks & E-Readers | Free books | Free courses

December 25, 2016

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad, Kindle Fire or
other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours.
We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media —
great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get
a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials right on a
computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection
you will find 800 great works by some classic writers (Dickens,
Dostoevsky, Austen, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers
(Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also
gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read more...

Thursday, December 22, 2016

In Aarhus, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of how a public place for learning should function.

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

It’s hard not feel as if you’ve just visited the library of the future after spending a day at Dokk1.In a formerly industrial part of Aarhus, egg chairs are now sprinkled around the periphery of the massive new “hybrid library.” There, a three-ton tubular bell called The Gong echoes through every
time a child is born at the local hospital. Outside, a ferry to
Copenhagen comes and goes from the harbor while kids and adults play
across a field with teeter-totters, a tire swing, and a huge slide in
the shape of an eagle.

Opened in 2015, Dokk1 is more than Scandinavia’s
largest library—it’s a community hub that meets the changing needs of
Denmark’s second largest city. Last summer, Dokk1 was named the Public
Library of the Year by the International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions (IFLA). As the notion that libraries
simply serve as a home for books dissolves, Dokk1 merges old and new
concepts of what a library should be.Read more...

Libraries | Ebooks| Advocacy | Programming | Trends

The internet stole the monopoly on knowledge but it can’t recreate a sense of place. Revival is possible

‘The library must rediscover its specialness. This must lie in
exploiting the strength of the post-digital age, the ‘age of live’.’
Illustration: Ellie Foreman

Public
libraries have had another bad year. They are like churches and local
railways. People like having them around, and are angry if they close.
But as for using them, well, there is so little time these days.

The admirable children’s laureate (and cartoonist) Chris Riddell said during the latest campaign
for libraries in November that, “if nurtured by government, they have
the ability to transform lives. We must all raise our voices to defend
them.”

But what sort of library are we defending? I’m not sure the fault in
this lies with that easy target, the government, nor even in the
once-gloomy fate of the book. Last week I was in my excellent local
library and it was near empty. The adjacent Waterstones was bursting at
the seams. I know it was Christmas, but something tells me there is a
problem with libraries, not with books. When an institution needs a
luvvie-march to survive, it looks doomed.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

As people become more reliant on devices and less likely to crack open a paperback, libraries have been forced to adapt.

Most modern libraries offer e-book and e-magazines, plus movies on DVD and other digital items. But did you know that many also provide such services as free Wi-Fi, used bookstores, and even unique items borrowing.

Coming off of National Library Week, here's a look at eight things you might not know about your local library: Read article:

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Reading

Penn Collins | December 19, 2016

E-book devices like the Kindle and Nook have already changed the
industry of publishing in their relatively short lives. Much as the iPod
did with music, now authors can self-publish right from their laptops
and readers can carry with them every book they own in something about
the size and weight of a paperback.

But while the e-book readers might seem good, uh, on paper, you might
consider continuing to read print books for the foreseeable future.
Science has given us several reasons
why the health and wellness benefits of reading printed material
outweigh the convenience and affordability of their digital brethren.

Archives

An ad taken out by Nautilus Mutual Life
Insurance in 1847 in the Daily Democrat newspaper in Louisville, K.Y.
offering slave policies. Nautilus was renamed New York Life Insurance in
1849.

New York Life,
the nation’s third-largest life insurance company, opened in
Manhattan’s financial district in the spring of 1845. The firm possessed
a prime address — 58 Wall Street — and a board of trustees populated by
some of the city’s wealthiest merchants, bankers and railroad magnates.

Sales were sluggish that year. So the company looked south.

There,
in Richmond, Va., an enterprising New York Life agent sold more than 30
policies in a single day in February 1846. Soon, advertisements began
appearing in newspapers from Wilmington, N.C., to Louisville as the New
York-based company encouraged Southerners to buy insurance to protect
their most precious commodity: their slaves.

Bibliotherapists recommend tomes they think can help what ails you; finding calm in ‘The Old Man and the Sea’

FRANKFURT—Depressed? Over-the-counter remedies abound, though some are hard to swallow. The 272-page “City of Thieves” by David Benioff, for example.

It is one palliative prescribed by Mano Bouzamour
at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, where he sat at a desk sporting a
white doctor’s coat and stethoscope. The Dutch novelist, who has no
medical license, was serving as a “book doctor.” After brief
consultations with people who lined up in the cold drizzle outside a
pop-up clinic, he pulled out a prescription pad and scribbled titles to
alleviate readers’ woes.

Advocacy & Activism

Jason Griffey | December 16, 2016

The idea that libraries are neutral spaces has been well and disabused over the last few years.
From the services we offer to the collections that we curate, the
decisions that libraries and librarians make are political ones that
reflect values. Sometimes those are the values of the organization,
sometimes the values of the individuals, and sometimes they are the
values of the communities that the library serves. Those values are
illustrated by our technologies, our ontologies, and our descriptors.
Those who attempt to hold that “neutrality” of information access is an
ideal for which to strive have had a hard time holding to that stance as
increasing numbers of librarians question and deconstruct our
profession. I would like to suggest something even stronger…that even if
it were possible for libraries to be neutral spaces, that to create
such a space would be morally questionable, and potentially actively
morally wrong. I say this as someone who firmly
believes in the maxim of combating bad speech with more speech. I am not
here advocating controls or restrictions on speech. But it is not the
responsibility of every library to collect and distribute literature of
hate, or falsehoods, or lies. Some libraries do need to collect
everything, the good and the bad, for archival and historical study
purposes, but those libraries are fairly obviously identified in
practice and the vast majority of libraries should and could take a
stand with their actions, programs, policies, and collections to be on
the side of justice and scientific fact. Neutrality favors the powerful, and further marginalizes the marginalized. In
the face of the current political climate, with the use of opinions as
bludgeons and disinformation as the weapon of choice for manipulation
and intellectual coercion, it is up to those who value fact and believe
in the care of those in need to stand up and positively affirm that to
do otherwise is evil. Read article

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Advocacy & Activism

In this
scorched-earth op-ed, Lauren Duca takes on Trump's systematic attempts
to destabilize the truth and weaken the foundation of American freedom.

Dec 10, 2016

The
CIA officially determined that Russia intervened in our election, and
President-elect Donald Trump dismissed the story as if it were a piece
of fake news. "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction," his transition team wrote in a statement.
"The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral
College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America
Great Again'."It
wasn't one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history, so
presumably that's another red-herring lie to distract from Trump
treating the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States
like it is some rogue blogger to be cast to the trolls. A foreign
government's interference in our election is a threat to our freedom,
and the President-elect's attempt to undermine the American people's
access to that information undermines the very foundation upon which
this country was built. It's also nothing new.Trump
won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force
of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing
deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to
reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the
truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a
bucket of ice over your head while listening to “Duel of the Fates."
Donald Trump is our President now; it’s time to wake up.

Reader's Advisory

This compilation of reading assigned to students everywhere will expand your horizons — and your bookshelves.

In the US, most students are required to read To Kill a Mockingbird
during their school years. This classic novel combines a
moving coming-of-age story with big issues like racism and criminal
injustice. Reading Mockingbird is such an integral part of the
American educational experience that we wondered: What classic books are
assigned to students elsewhere?

We posed this question to our TED-Ed Innovative Educators and members
of the TED-Ed community. People all over the globe responded, and we
curated our list to focus on local authors.
Many respondents made it
clear in their countries, as in the US, few books are absolutely
mandatory. Take a look at what students in countries from Ireland to
Iran, Ghana to Germany, are asked to read and why:

Internet & Literacy

Did
the Holocaust really happen? No. The Holocaust did not really happen.
Six million Jews did not die. It is a Jewish conspiracy theory spread by
vested interests to obscure the truth. The truth is that there is no
evidence any people were gassed in any camp. The Holocaust did not
happen.

Are you happy with that answer? Happy that if you have
children, this is what they’re being exposed to? That all across America
and France and Hungary and Holland and Britain, when people ask that
question, this is what they are clicking on and reading and absorbing?
No? Well, then, we really, really need to talk about Google. Right now.
Because these are the “facts” of what happened according to the number
one source of information to the entire planet. Type this into your
Google search bar: “did the hol”. And Google suggests you search for this: “Did the Holocaust happen?” Read more...

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Archives & Special Collections | Digital Humanities

December 7, 2016 | Tim Chambers

The
military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the
National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished
until 2006

Dorothea Lange—well-known for her FSA photographs like Migrant Mother—was
hired by the U.S. government to make a photographic record of the
“evacuation” and “relocation” of Japanese-Americans in 1942. She was
eager to take the commission, despite being opposed to the effort, as
she believed “a true record of the evacuation would be valuable in the
future.”

The military commanders that reviewed her work realized
that Lange’s contrary point of view was evident through her photographs,
and seized them for the duration of World War II, even writing
“Impounded” across some of the prints. The photos were quietly deposited
into the National Archives, where they remained largely unseen until
2006.

I’ve also made a limted number of prints of her photos available for sale at Anchor Editions, and I’m donating 50% of the proceeds to the ACLU—they were there during WWII handling the two principle Supreme Court cases,
fighting against the government’s mass incarceration of
Japanese-Americans—and they have pledged to continue to fight against
further unconstitutional civil rights violations. Their fight seems
especially important today given the current tide of anti-Muslim
rhetoric, and talk of national registries and reactionary immigration
policies.

“A photographic record could protect against false
allegations of mistreatment and violations of international law, but it
carried the risk, of course, of documenting actual mistreatment.”

— Linda Gordon, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment Read more...

NEWS ANALYSIS: Enraged by fake news story, a man fires a rifle
three time into a pizza restaurant in the U.S. capital, bringing urgency
to efforts to find ways to rein in false rumor stories circulating on
the internet.

WASHINGTON—It was an event that many of us in the news
business have feared would happen: A deranged gunman, fueled by passion
based on a series of fake news stories, came to the nation's capital
with an assault rifle, entered a place of business and fired.

The gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, was
quickly arrested after shooting into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria three
times. He told police after he was arrested that he came to Washington
to investigate reports of a child sex-trafficking ring being run out of
the pizzeria by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.

The fake news about Comet Ping Pong had been circulating on social media
since before the election, with increasingly shrill stories seemingly
attributed to reliable media sources. The stories got so far out of
control that one site, Reddit, banned any discussion of what had become
known as "pizzagate" from its forums.

But that wasn't the only incident based on this fake news story.Read more...

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Librarians

Illustration by Michael Driver

Monday 5 December 2016

Unlike
many librarians who always dreamed of standing behind a counter and
stamping books, I came to the profession by accident. When I left
university with a humanities degree in the 1970s, I had no clue about
what I wanted to do with my state-funded higher education. I applied for
a job as a gas meter reader which seemed suitable for a working-class
lad from a council estate, but at the interview I was told that I was
over-qualified and so I became a library assistant instead.

I quickly discovered that there wasn’t much to the library
lark, but that if I wanted to get on I would have to become a fully
qualified librarian.

Armed with my diploma and a burning social conscience, I set out to
change the world of public libraries. Nearly 40 years on I have made the
smallest of dents in its battleship armour. But on the way I have made
met some amazing people. Read more...

Thursday, December 1, 2016

(CNN)Just because it's on the internet doesn't make it true. It seems so simple, but if everyone knew that, Facebook and Google wouldn't have to pull bogus news sites from their advertising algorithms
and people wouldn't breathlessly share stories that claim Donald Trump
is a secret lizard person or Hillary Clinton is an android in a
pantsuit.

It doesn't have to be this way. Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide.

1. Fake news
These
are the easiest to debunk and often come from known sham sites that are
designed to look like real news outlets. They may include misleading
photographs and headlines that, at first read, sound like they could be
real. 2. Misleading news
These are the
hardest to debunk, because they often contain a kernel of truth: A fact,
event or quote that has been taken out of context. Look for sensational
headlines that aren't supported by the information in the article. 3. Highly partisan news
A type of misleading news, this may be an interpretation of a real news event where the facts are manipulated to fit an agenda. 4. Clickbait
The
shocking or teasing headlines of these stories trick you into clicking
for more information -- which may or may not live up to what was
promised. 5. Satire
This one is tough,
because satire doesn't pretend to be real and serves a purpose as
commentary or entertainment. But if people are not familiar with a
satire site, they can share the news as if it is legitimate. Read more...